At the moment, Newt Gingrich is slightly ahead in Alabama while Mitt Romney has a narrow edge in Mississippi. But numbers wizard Nate Silver thinks that polls from southern states are less reliable than elsewhere and that therefore, it's still anyone's race in those two states. If you had looked at the Real Clear Politics average of polls in Alabama in advance of the 2008 primaries, for instance, you would have called the Republican and the Democratic races wrong. Hillary Rodham Clinton had a nominal advantage in the Democratic race there, leading in the Real Clear Politics average by about one percentage point. But in fact, Barack Obama won. It wasn't even close; he carried the state by 14 percentage points. A similar problem was evident on the Republican side. The polls were wildly divergent from one another - showing everything from a 16-point lead for Senator John McCain to a 9-point advantage for Mike Huckabee. But the average put Mr. McCain about four percentage points...(Read Full Post)